by Gail Jones
Katherine White was an Australian from Adelaide studying literature in Cambridge, at Girton. This much he knew. She possessed a composure that made others reticent. She was softly spoken, intelligent and introspective, but she also wore thick eyeliner, miniskirts and knee-high boots. Noah thought her dazzling. He had seen her at parties with her English boyfriend, a lethargic, limpid fellow who wore neck-scarves and smoked with his head tilted backwards, like a man in the movies. He was also studying literature, and had published poetry in small journals with oddly artful names. Noah despised him. He discovered over time that Katherine preferred the Stones to the Beatles, Dickens to Austen, Labour to Tory. She was an Anglican, an only child, and hoped to become a writer. Her postgraduate topic had something to do with the comic novel.
When her boyfriend dumped her, Noah asked her out, and to his surprise she agreed. After enduring a cacophonous concert by a no-name band, she took him to her room, made love to him and then cried in an unseemly gush over her old boyfriend. Noah was besotted. As she wept, he held her in his arms, hardly believing his luck, but already fearing that he would soon lose her. His hand had come to rest on her thigh, warm and damp from their lovemaking. He snuffled at her hair, which was scented with chemical lavender; he felt the shape of her body, slightly pulsing with her tears; he knew her sumptuous perfection, even as she was thinking of someone else.
They married six months later, James turning up to perform the role of best man. Katherine’s parents, Norman and Margaret, made the long journey from Adelaide and kindly paid for their honeymoon in Italy. Noah felt happy for the first time in his life, and Katherine, too, seemed wholly content. He was to remember her padding across the carpet in black stockings and no shoes, waving a few pages of a story, newly typed, with the bright hills of Umbria in the window behind her. Her thesis work ceased, but she was focused on her fiction, and busy. When they returned to Cambridge, they rented a detached, leaky cottage with bad plumbing on the outskirts of the town. Katherine read chapters of Noah’s thesis and fixed his grammar; he in turn praised her writing and worked part-time in the local pub.
When Martin arrived, early and unplanned, it had at first seemed a calamity. But both parents looked down upon their son, flapping his rosy limbs, staring up at them with such abundant trust, and felt amazed at how feasible their married life now seemed. Noah thought of Piero’s Nativity and recalled a phrase from somewhere: the tiny, not the immense, will teach our groping eyes. In the fuzzy, milky mornings they stayed in bed together, heating each other with their bodies, chatting in soft voices and cooing nonsense to the baby. Noah scratched at the yellow cradle cap that encrusted his son’s scalp, leaned over, sniffed at the small dangling head, and felt at last that he had become an adult. Any doubts of their life together faded. Their hasty marriage had been substantiated. Here between them, wriggling, hiccupping, leaking and burping, was the new being to prove it.
Parenthood altered their sense of time. It raced and it stalled; there were wearisome nights and accelerated days. Their capacity to withstand sleep deprivation increased, so that they swung between heightened delight at the baby, a surprising elation, and dire exhaustion. But both kept working, each on their project. Both were smitten with Martin and found in him a lucid focus when neither could see the other clearly.
When Katherine had her first short story published, Noah bought a bottle of Chianti, nesting in its straw basket (‘called a fiasco’, he instructed), and toasted her success.
‘To more fiascos!’ Katherine shouted.
This was another moment that would stand in later for fleeting accord, for the time he felt able to seize her wrist, and pull her towards him, and know that some spirit and desire had been reciprocated. Mouth to mouth, his lips on her neck, the feather-feel of her breath entering his ear. For all her complaints against him, and her essential dissatisfaction, he knew enough to cherish those occasions when she fell into his arms. He was the wrong man, she announced to him more than once, and though told he was wrong, and a substitute, he nevertheless adored her.
Katherine kept writing but with little acknowledgement, and when Evie was born she became depressed. Noah visited her in the clinic, handing over his baby daughter with trepidation, thinking his wife might drop her, or fling her away. But her attention was on picking fluff from her nightgown, while the baby swept its arms around, wailing, finding no mother. When at last Katherine came home, she was little changed, and from time to time went to bed, as his own mother had, leaving the children to fend for themselves.
Once Noah returned from work to find four-year-old Martin attempting to bathe his one-year-old sister. Evie was gasping for breath and deathly cold.
He was frightened, then. Frightened by fatherhood and his apparently unknowable wife. Frightened to lurch forwards for his squirming baby, blue from near drowning, and scare his son, who was already sounding an offended howl. A kind student, Sally, was installed as the home help. She was happy to be dignified by the title ‘nanny’, and agreed to keep the children alive.
What stage was that, he would wonder, in the summary of his life? His children endangered, then saved, his anxieties almost perpetual. It had marked a shift in him, to see his children on the edge of disaster. Noah had by now secured a junior teaching post at a provincial university. Once a year he went to Italy, taking his family with him, and they all began to yearn for these luminous times away. They ate together in trattorias, they hiked up mountains and swam in lakes, they lingered in ruined and picturesque places, Katherine and the children standing on paths of small stones, or waiting in the shade of umbrella pines while Noah took notes in the sunshine. He dragged them to galleries and churches and lectured them on frescoes and paintings. His world had a bossy authority they could not resist, and his interest in Piero supplied images that became a language they shared, as other families shared television, or tales of cheery outings.
From the outside they looked like a happy family. But when Norman and Margaret visited a year after Evie’s birth, they sensed something amiss and whispered of it to Noah. He didn’t tell them about the bathing incident, but he hoped Sally’s presence would reassure them. Together they holidayed in Florence, the grandparents doting, impressed by Martin’s beginner’s Italian and his little sister’s charm. Katherine tried her best, but with news of James’s death in a car accident later that year, she again subsided. Noah’s own grief was put aside as he dealt with Katherine’s gloom. She slid away once again. She became unreachable. He knew then, instinctively sure, that solace lay with his children. And it pained him to realise that he had not made her happy—indeed, that he had married an irredeemably unhappy woman. Katherine was never restored to his original vision, from a time when she was with someone else, aloof, and scarcely acknowledged his existence.
She died of cervical cancer, three years later. The world closed in on them. The sky collapsed. Noah went quiet and Martin wept without restraint. Evie hid herself away, under the table, or a bed, or in a dark corner somewhere. It was a shattering Noah could never have prepared for. He felt abandoned and worn out, and could hardly bear the cruel spectacle of Martin weeping. If he neglected Evie at that time, it was because Martin, like himself, could barely stand up with the weight of losing her. The sight of her hat on the hallstand was enough to set them off, and the scent of lavender she loved—her hand creams and soaps, the disintegrating sprigs she had left everywhere in cupboards and drawers—became intolerable. Together father and son began eradicating signs of her existence. Evie, too little to understand, watched bewildered as they made bonfires and bagged clothes and packed away photographs. They agreed, for the time being, not to speak of her, and this became a pact between them, a shrewd and practical repression, so that Noah and Martin conspired unwittingly to unmake Evie’s memories.
At Christmas they bought their customary Italian panettone. Noah and his son faced each other over the enormous spongy cake, tears in their eyes, without any appetite, trying to maintain just a semblanc
e of family ritual. Evie stuffed herself, oblivious, and then wanted more.
After the loss of their daughter, Norman and Margaret begged Noah to move back to Australia, and a few years later he did, bringing the children to Adelaide. His job in art history at the university was not in his area of scholarship, and it was harder at such distance to contrive their visits to Italy. But this was family, now, the grandparents and the children, and this was his city, now, though he thought it vacant and severe. Its grids of white light disturbed him; nothing in it spoke of connection. It was Katherine’s place, not his. Walking up North Terrace, his face in the hot wind, Noah felt stranded on another planet, almost choking in the wrong air.
Colleagues at the university were helpful and kind, and Noah managed to teach, once a year, a course on quattrocento paintings. Cycling to work through the parklands, listening to the call of corellas and wattlebirds, seeing the flash of light through the trees, and his own skin mystically dappled, he felt halfway himself. He looked down at his freckled hands gripping the handlebars and knew he was able and modestly strong. He felt his legs pump him in and out of patches of shadow, pushing him forwards. There was something to be said for humble endurance. Perseverance is all: it could have been his slogan. But he was forty years old and felt his life almost over.
Even then he knew he had inordinately gifted children. Martin, by now fifteen, could draw images with preternatural skill, and Evie had a freakishly retentive memory. Noah persisted for them. Only for them. It was his children’s attachment to life, their rigorous vitality, that saved him. Of his own parents he knew little. His father wrote a curt note on the event of his marriage, but they’d not resumed contact. Noah sent his Adelaide address and phone number, but received no response. The gulf between them remained, and neither party was inclined to cross it. How disproportionate, this severance of feeling. For each it may have been both a punishment and a mutilation. Occasionally, Noah dreamed of his father as he dreamed of Maggie, waking in fright like a child, relieved they were only figments, and gone.
One day, walking on King William Street, he met Sister Perpetua. She strode towards him, instantly recognisable—the flap of her white habit, the austere air of stability—and he felt his old life circling around him like a noose. This accidental return filled him with ambivalence. They made small talk, then went to a teahouse for a more serious conversation. To Sister Perpetua, only fifteen years older than himself, he described how the leper colony had deformed him, so that fear made him exaggerate his own importance, and become vainglorious and alienated from his family. He had used Francis, he had neglected his parents. He told her of his life with Katherine, and of her and James’s deaths, of the talented children, and of his love for them. He spoke shyly of his despair and more securely of his scholarship. And finally, bravely, Noah confessed his sense of worthlessness.
When he encapsulated it for her, it seemed indeed a paltry life. Holding herself apart, Perpetua offered a predictable response. She reminded him of Christ’s love and the force of prayer. She recommended self-denial and submission to fate. One of the mysteries of time, she added, was reparation.
Noah withered under Perpetua’s impersonal slogans. For all her concern, she was following a remorseless script. She’d become orthodox, and forgetful of the place and time in which they’d met.
Then she asked, ‘Your painter. What’s his name again?’
Noah described the Nativity in the National Gallery. He’d last spoken of it years ago, trying to seduce Katherine, and then in lectures to students who were too discourteous to disguise their boredom. And now here he was, describing it to a nun. He was revealing that moment when, like a panicked saint, he’d come alive with inception and changed the direction of his life. He was speaking with passion of an image, and the timeless call of images. He might have had flames coming from his body, or a blaze of blood in his eyes. In this moment of disclosure, heart to heart with his past, he understood how art had made his loneliness endurable.
9
AFTER THE THAI meal with Evie, Martin walked back to his home in the suburb of Alexandria, threading through the streets of Kings Cross, up through Surry Hills and across Waterloo. He was sober and alert. The sky was clear. He thought of his sister, there, in his father’s rooms, touching his things, looking about, experiencing time alone with Noah as in a private communion. He felt envious and troubled. He wondered if she might take something he cared about and store it away for herself. It was an irrational resentment, born of their silence. She had not wanted to speak and he had felt he was intruding. At home he went to his studio, brewed a coffee on the small portable gas stove he kept there, and sketched late into the shiny, obsidian night. At dawn, noticing as if stunned the change in the light, he went exhausted to bed, brimful with images.
After the Thai meal with Martin, Evie felt a sexual yearning. She considered walking into Kings Cross to pick up a man at a bar, something she’d not done for at least ten years. But instead she took a bath in Noah’s rather chaste-looking bathroom. Lying there in clear water, she thought of Martin’s question about de Saussure, and recalled the sky chart and its neat gradations of blue. Looking down at her own body, she remembered Condy’s crystals. When she was a child, her father sprinkled them in her bath to relieve rashes. The crystals leeched in runnels and swirls so the water became violet, then fuchsia. Noah had swished the bathwater with his hand, evenly dispersing the colour. She’d thought it beautiful. Her own limbs, a trembling purple. The specificity of this memory still surprised her.
Evie dried herself and pulled her nightie over her head. She lay in her father’s bed, not feeling at all transgressive. Almost immediately, made tranquil by memory and bathing, she fell deeply asleep.
10
HOW HIS HEART leaped up. The descent into Palermo airport was terrifying, sliding past a jagged mountain and pitching down near the sea. There was turbulence and the plane seesawed like a toy, the mountain and the sea tipping and rising. When Martin stumbled onto the tarmac, he almost fell. He found his way to the airport bus, parked in the centre of a building site surrounded by barbed wire and palm trees with no palms, and hoisted his luggage into its belly as the driver stood apart, smoking with a sneer and pretending to ignore him. On the long ride into town he watched the coast flash by, then the new high-rise apartments on the edge of town. In the old centre, at the train station, he gathered his bag and set off with a barely legible map, printed from the internet.
Crossing near Piazza Giulio Cesare, he was almost killed by aggressive traffic. It was not a good start. A car mirror bashed his elbow, which began to throb as if fractured. An angry face shouted out a Sicilian obscenity. In pain, Martin dragged himself up noisy Via Maqueda to discover that the small hotel he’d booked online claimed never to have heard of him. The large man behind the counter waved him away. After twenty-four hours of travel from Sydney, Martin felt deranged. In the lobby a man approached him, offering alternative accommodation, a spare room in the place he shared with his mother, in a little backstreet not far from the Ballarò market.
‘Tommaso Salvo,’ he announced. He did not extend his hand.
It was a cold greeting. Martin noticed his discreet nod to the man at the counter. Where was he from? How long would he stay? What was he doing here? To the last Martin answered, ‘Tourism,’ and Salvo seemed satisfied, while also making clear that he didn’t believe him.
In Palermo, almost at once, Martin sank into stopped time, as if held under glass and fixed for inspection. He told himself he was following his father’s footsteps, but his motions were already those of a man lost in the world. His elbow flared to a purple plum, then deflated to a black and yellow bruise. Twisting his head, he examined his injury in the speckled mirror on the wardrobe in his room; the discolouration, pied, was an omen of bad luck. Each day it rained, heavy and cold. He’d come from rainy summer in Sydney to rainy winter in Palermo, and walked with soaked boots and a hunched body to explore the city.
It
seemed reasonable to begin his inquiries at the art history department of the university. He told the female voice on the telephone that he was a bereaved son, in search of his father. He wanted sympathy and his mission recognised, but she was curt and practical. Yes, the Australian man, Noah Glass. Yes, he had been here. Martin was given the name of another art historian, Antonio Dotti, who she said had been a friend of his father. For a short time, apparently, Noah had stayed with Dotti in Palermo and once co-authored a paper with him. This man, of whom Martin knew nothing else, would perhaps explain why his father had visited Sicily and what he had discovered here. Dotti would return to work in a week, maybe two. The voice said not to call again, that Signor Dotti would be in touch with him when he returned.
In the meantime, having no company, Martin made an effort to befriend Tommaso Salvo. A blunt man with a look of perpetual suspicion, he nonetheless enjoyed having an ignorant Australian to educate. He was about the same age as Martin, and lived with his mother, Maria, a thickset triangle in black, who rarely left the kitchen. She nodded to Martin once, impressed when he formulated an elegant compliment to her cooking in his competent Italian, but never spoke in return. He’d heard her argue with her son, but she was silent when he was present, as if speaking might release something that could harm or diminish her.
Martin’s room, though on the first floor, was dark and cramped and held a view into a brothel across the street. From his room, uncomfortably close, Martin could see women leaning out of the windows for a smoke or hanging their underwear on a looped line. He heard Sicilian, Italian and what could have been Albanian. Once a woman called out to him, but he ducked behind the curtain, and then heard a wave of derisive laughter. After that he kept the thin curtain drawn, not wanting to seem too curious, and wishing to indicate respect.